


And Nothing Hurt

by gildedeggplant



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Alcohol, Depression, Dissociation, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 08:49:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4870714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gildedeggplant/pseuds/gildedeggplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here’s the thing about drinking alone in a dark room: it makes it that much harder to believe in the unlikely fact of your own existence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Nothing Hurt

Here’s the thing about drinking alone in a dark room: it makes it that much harder to believe in the unlikely fact of your own existence.

Cecil has a ritual. He waits for a mild, moonless night, when it’s neither hot nor cold. He comes home from work and leaves his shoes by the kitchen door and his glasses on the counter. Then he picks up a ful, unopened bottle of vodka and descends the basement stairs. Carefully, he picks his way, on stocking feet, to the middle of the room, and he sits.

  
He waits for the effects of self-imposed sensory deprivation to set in. When he has lost all sense of his surroundings he begins to drink, putting the bottle to his lips and ingesting the contents in long, businesslike swigs.

When the bottle, his only connection to the physical world, feels lighter by half a liter or so, the tears come. He registers their arrival with distant satisfaction.They are soundless stalactites dripping down the landscape he is reluctant to acknowledge as his own face.

Only now, from the safe vantage point of this dark planet lit by no sun, does he allow himself to remember. At some point he sleeps. By the time he awakens - stiff and aching, throat rasping with thirst - the residue of these memories will be swept away by the nagging demands of his physical form.

So it goes, and so it has gone since… a long time ago. If he thinks of it at all, in waking hours, he considers it a sort of existential reset button. Nothing to worry about.

This is the first time Cecil has found himself heading for the basement since he and Carlos decided to make a home together. He didn’t consciously wait for a night when Carlos planned to stay overnight at the lab, and he didn’t consciously hide the bottle in the back of the cabinet, and when Carlos asked him about his plans for the evening, he wasn’t lying when he mentioned “a quiet night at home.” These are the arrangements that needed to be made, and so he made them.

He is well into the “silent crying” portion of the night when his phone screams into the darkness. The sound is deafening in the void of his self-denial. His hand jerks, slipping on the neck of the bottle, which drops to the floor and shatters. Merely to appease the screaming gods, Cecil fumbles for his pocket and jabs at buttons until silence returns. Within moments though, it’s replaced by a tentative voice. “Ceec? What was that? Did you drop something?”

Instinctively, Cecil places the phone to his ear. He swallows heavily, tucking his legs in closer to his body as spilled vodka begins to soak into his socks. “Cecil, what’s going on? Are you all right?”

His face is wet; his phone is wet; his hand is wet. His socks are wet, and the floor is cold. He has a body, and it is uncomfortable, and he is dismayed to be reminded of this fact. He needs to make it go away. He tries to solve the problem. “F-fine…” he manages to whisper. “I’m fine.”

“Oh, honey… don’t move. I’m coming home.” Cecil nods, eyelids drifting shut and replacing one kind of darkness with another.

“Five minutes,” says the voice. “Hang on. I love you.”

Cecil lowers the phone, and his hand, to his lap. He waits in the darkness and prepares to exist again.


End file.
